[PATCH 01/14] xfs: document the motivation for online fsck design

Darrick J. Wong
2022-12-30T22:29:40Z

Start the first chapter of the online fsck design documentation.
This covers the motivations for creating this in the first place.

Signed-off-by: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
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Documentation/filesystems/index.rst | 1
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diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/index.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/index.rst
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--- a/Documentation/filesystems/index.rst
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/index.rst
@@ -123,4 +123,5 @@ Documentation for filesystem implementations.
vfat
xfs-delayed-logging-design
xfs-self-describing-metadata
+ xfs-online-fsck-design
zonefs
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/xfs-online-fsck-design.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/xfs-online-fsck-design.rst
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+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+.. _xfs_online_fsck_design:
+
+..
+ Mapping of heading styles within this document:
+ Heading 1 uses "====" above and below
+ Heading 2 uses "===="
+ Heading 3 uses "----"
+ Heading 4 uses "````"
+ Heading 5 uses "^^^^"
+ Heading 6 uses "~~~~"
+ Heading 7 uses "...."
+
+ Sections are manually numbered because apparently that's what everyone
+ does in the kernel.
+
+======================
+XFS Online Fsck Design
+======================
+
+This document captures the design of the online filesystem check feature for
+XFS.
+The purpose of this document is threefold:
+
+- To help kernel distributors understand exactly what the XFS online fsck
+ feature is, and issues about which they should be aware.
+
+- To help people reading the code to familiarize themselves with the relevant
+ concepts and design points before they start digging into the code.
+
+- To help developers maintaining the system by capturing the reasons
+ supporting higher level decisionmaking.
+
+As the online fsck code is merged, the links in this document to topic branches
+will be replaced with links to code.
+
+This document is licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License, v2.
+The primary author is Darrick J. Wong.
+
+This design document is split into seven parts.
+Part 1 defines what fsck tools are and the motivations for writing a new one.
+Parts 2 and 3 present a high level overview of how online fsck process works
+and how it is tested to ensure correct functionality.
+Part 4 discusses the user interface and the intended usage modes of the new
+program.
+Parts 5 and 6 show off the high level components and how they fit together, and
+then present case studies of how each repair function actually works.
+Part 7 sums up what has been discussed so far and speculates about what else
+might be built atop online fsck.
+
+.. contents:: Table of Contents
+ :local:
+
+1. What is a Filesystem Check?
+==============================
+
+A Unix filesystem has three main jobs: to provide a hierarchy of names through
+which application programs can associate arbitrary blobs of data for any
+length of time, to virtualize physical storage media across those names, and
+to retrieve the named data blobs at any time.
+The filesystem check (fsck) tool examines all the metadata in a filesystem
+to look for errors.
+Simple tools only check for obvious corruptions, but the more sophisticated
+ones cross-reference metadata records to look for inconsistencies.
+People do not like losing data, so most fsck tools also contains some ability
+to deal with any problems found.
+As a word of caution -- the primary goal of most Linux fsck tools is to restore
+the filesystem metadata to a consistent state, not to maximize the data
+recovered.
+That precedent will not be challenged here.
+
+Filesystems of the 20th century generally lacked any redundancy in the ondisk
+format, which means that fsck can only respond to errors by erasing files until
+errors are no longer detected.
+System administrators avoid data loss by increasing the number of separate
+storage systems through the creation of backups; and they avoid downtime by
+increasing the redundancy of each storage system through the creation of RAID.
+More recent filesystem designs contain enough redundancy in their metadata that
+it is now possible to regenerate data structures when non-catastrophic errors
+occur; this capability aids both strategies.
+Over the past few years, XFS has added a storage space reverse mapping index to
+make it easy to find which files or metadata objects think they own a
+particular range of storage.
+Efforts are under way to develop a similar reverse mapping index for the naming
+hierarchy, which will involve storing directory parent pointers in each file.
+With these two pieces in place, XFS uses secondary information to perform more
+sophisticated repairs.
+
+TLDR; Show Me the Code!
+-----------------------
+
+Code is posted to the kernel.org git trees as follows:
+`kernel changes <https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/djwong/xfs-linux.git/log/?h=repair-symlink>`_,
+`userspace changes <https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/djwong/xfsprogs-dev.git/log/?h=scrub-media-scan-service>`_, and
+`QA test changes <https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/djwong/xfstests-dev.git/log/?h=repair-dirs>`_.
+Each kernel patchset adding an online repair function will use the same branch
+name across the kernel, xfsprogs, and fstests git repos.
+
+Existing Tools
+--------------
+
+The online fsck tool described here will be the third tool in the history of
+XFS (on Linux) to check and repair filesystems.
+Two programs precede it:
+
+The first program, ``xfs_check``, was created as part of the XFS debugger
+(``xfs_db``) and can only be used with unmounted filesystems.
+It walks all metadata in the filesystem looking for inconsistencies in the
+metadata, though it lacks any ability to repair what it finds.
+Due to its high memory requirements and inability to repair things, this
+program is now deprecated and will not be discussed further.
+
+The second program, ``xfs_repair``, was created to be faster and more robust
+than the first program.
+Like its predecessor, it can only be used with unmounted filesystems.
+It uses extent-based in-memory data structures to reduce memory consumption,
+and tries to schedule readahead IO appropriately to reduce I/O waiting time
+while it scans the metadata of the entire filesystem.
+The most important feature of this tool is its ability to respond to
+inconsistencies in file metadata and directory tree by erasing things as needed
+to eliminate problems.
+Space usage metadata are rebuilt from the observed file metadata.
+
+Problem Statement
+-----------------
+
+The current XFS tools leave several problems unsolved:
+
+1. **User programs** suddenly **lose access** to information in the computer
+ when unexpected shutdowns occur as a result of silent corruptions in the
+ filesystem metadata.
+ These occur **unpredictably** and often without warning.
+
+2. **Users** experience a **total loss of service** during the recovery period
+ after an **unexpected shutdown** occurs.
+
+3. **Users** experience a **total loss of service** if the filesystem is taken
+ offline to **look for problems** proactively.
+
+4. **Data owners** cannot **check the integrity** of their stored data without
+ reading all of it.
+ This may expose them to substantial billing costs when a linear media scan
+ might suffice.
+
+5. **System administrators** cannot **schedule** a maintenance window to deal
+ with corruptions if they **lack the means** to assess filesystem health
+ while the filesystem is online.
+
+6. **Fleet monitoring tools** cannot **automate periodic checks** of filesystem
+ health when doing so requires **manual intervention** and downtime.
+
+7. **Users** can be tricked into **doing things they do not desire** when
+ malicious actors **exploit quirks of Unicode** to place misleading names
+ in directories.
+
+Given this definition of the problems to be solved and the actors who would
+benefit, the proposed solution is a third fsck tool that acts on a running
+filesystem.
+
+This new third program has three components: an in-kernel facility to check
+metadata, an in-kernel facility to repair metadata, and a userspace driver
+program to drive fsck activity on a live filesystem.
+``xfs_scrub`` is the name of the driver program.
+The rest of this document presents the goals and use cases of the new fsck
+tool, describes its major design points in connection to those goals, and
+discusses the similarities and differences with existing tools.
+
++--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+| **Note**: |
++--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+| Throughout this document, the existing offline fsck tool can also be |
+| referred to by its current name "``xfs_repair``". |
+| The userspace driver program for the new online fsck tool can be |
+| referred to as "``xfs_scrub``". |
+| The kernel portion of online fsck that validates metadata is called |
+| "online scrub", and portion of the kernel that fixes metadata is called |
+| "online repair". |
++--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+Secondary metadata indices enable the reconstruction of parts of a damaged
+primary metadata object from secondary information.
+XFS filesystems shard themselves into multiple primary objects to enable better
+performance on highly threaded systems and to contain the blast radius when
+problems happen.
+The naming hierarchy is broken up into objects known as directories and files;
+and the physical space is split into pieces known as allocation groups.
+The division of the filesystem into principal objects (allocation groups and
+inodes) means that there are ample opportunities to perform targeted checks and
+repairs on a subset of the filesystem.
+While this is going on, other parts continue processing IO requests.
+Even if a piece of filesystem metadata can only be regenerated by scanning the
+entire system, the scan can still be done in the background while other file
+operations continue.
+
+In summary, online fsck takes advantage of resource sharding and redundant
+metadata to enable targeted checking and repair operations while the system
+is running.
+This capability will be coupled to automatic system management so that
+autonomous self-healing of XFS maximizes service availability.